Ask YC: What are the likely monthly server costs for a facebook app that serves the facebook developer community, i.e about 5000 apps and rising? Assume that the app is an ad network of sorts and does not need to store video or audio media files. Thanks.
Project Agape who is behind the Causes Facebook app uses the following:<p><pre><code> * mySQL 5.0
* Ruby on Rails
* 14 application servers, 2 database servers and 5 boxes in reserve
* 3 Image Servers (2 Squid, 1 image source)
* Apache 2 on Image Source
* WebApp servers have 2GB of ram
* 1 server for serving static content
* 26 Mongrel services per box
* 4 GB of RAM per box
* 50 - 60 MB of RAM per Mongrel service for a total use of around 1.5 GB of memory set aside for Mongrel
</code></pre>
Additional:<p><pre><code> * A pair of F5 Loadbalancers
* All systems running FreeBSD 6.2
* memcached
* nginx (not pound)
</code></pre>
Specific Rails technologies used: nginx (not pound), Evented Mongrel, squid
From: <a href="http://www.nonprofittechblog.org/interview-with-joe-green-and-chris-chan-of-project-agape" rel="nofollow">http://www.nonprofittechblog.org/interview-with-joe-green-an...</a>
It is hard to give that detail without knowing detail about how many concurrent users are using apps. If we have more breakdown then it is easy to give that detail. <p>Without much requirement detail, On the safe side - My guess is three Linux server cluster (Specs 2-CPU and @4GB RAM ( @2500$) )should be enough to server content for high usage site like facebook.<p>It is purely guess based on my limited knowledge of facebook. If you have any specific detail like<p>- Avg Concurrent users
- Peak time concurrent users
- Apps software platform ( java app server, php, .NET ?? )<p>then that will help.<p>